Posted by Quixie at 7:11 PM
It’s tempting to think of science and culture as parallel tracks supporting the train of humanity as it chugs along toward the future. But they’re not parallel at all. Science and culture are both provisional in nature, this they have in common—nothing is written in stone in either—but the adjustments in our understanding of the world that they each provide us are not of the same kind. Science accumulates knowledge. Culture is the way whereby we assimilate this accumulated knowledge into our lives. Science gives us models of reality. Culture prescribes our behavior in light of the models. The respective aims, though they may seem inextricably linked, are rather independent of each other, albeit not completely (yet even when they depend on each other, culture always follows our mode of technology, and not the other way around). On the main, science is dispassionate and objective, and relies on consistency and predictability. Culture is rather more subjective and capricious, and is decidedly more arbitrary as a result. Science runs in but one direction. That is to say, we cannot unlearn something once we have learned it. It’s like the proverbial box of Pandora. We can’t go back to “unknowing” something. On the other hand, we can never know which cultural material will take root in our world, even if we do our best to keep well informed of scientific discoveries; some stuff sticks; some doesn’t. We could say science moves like a glacier, fast or slow at any given time, but in a single general direction: down. By contrast, culture moves more like a pendulum. It tends to be cyclical, polar. And though they’re difficult to discern in realtime from up close, given enough time and perspective, we can statistically trace these dissimilar movements in relation to each other.
This year marks the commemoration of the bicentennial of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which affords us with an occasion to survey and critically assess the association of these two phenomena as they relate to this novel.
We all know the meta-story. Mary Shelley was there on that fateful night when Lord Byron reportedly challenged everyone in attendance to write their own ghost story. She took up the challenge and wrote Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus shortly after that dare. She was only nineteen years old when it was finished. Here we are now, two centuries later, still ruminating about it and celebrating it. Two hundred years is a hell of a long time to be at the top of the charts. Not bad for a teenager.
In fact, it’s pretty amazing, not only because she was a successful woman writer at a time when women writers were something of a rarity, but also because of the caliber of her writing—articulate, erudite, world-weary—which is surprising from one so young. She also had reportedly had very little formal education, which makes her undeniable chops all the more impressive. (Chalk one up for the autodidacts of the world.) It that weren’t enough, her novel transcended many of the conventions of the romanticism that was then in full swing while retaining others. As such, the book marks an important point of transition toward modernism. We could even dare call this work sui generis without exaggeration; it is arguably the first example of what we now call science-fiction, two hundred years after that legendary opium-enhanced sleepover night dare.
By subtitling her book The Modern Prometheus, Shelley left little doubt that she aspired to write more than just a Romantic ghost story. The Romantic movement had been a reaction to the Enlightenment’s emphasis on logic and reason as ultimate arbiters of truth, but by the turn of the nineteenth century, instinct and a kind of mystical approach had become a renewed focus of understanding. While the dichotomy between logic and instinct was certainly no novelty—Apollo and Dionysus have been figuratively vying for the favor of mortals since time immemorial—it took on a new characteristic that was specific to the newer times at the turn of the nineteenth century. The industrialization of the world, the rapid growth of cities, advances in fossil fuel technology and in chemistry and in physics: all these added mass to an already swinging pendulum weight. What goes up must come down, and the Romantics’ aversion to logic and “the here and now,” a kind of distrust in the ‘tyranny of the empirical,’ an attitude which lasted well into the Victorian Era, was once again subdued by the increasingly rapid advances in the sciences, particularly in the health sciences. Statistical data began to suggest to us that the answer to one of the questions raised by Shelley’s novel, namely, “Can we extend life?”, which was only merely a theoretical feasibility at the time of her writing, might turn out to be a resounding “yes!” Who could lament that?
But a funny thing happened on the way to the twenty-first century, though. Namely, the twentieth. The birth of moving pictures at the turn of the century led to a proliferation of film and audio technology. Cinema became a bona fide film industry, which would eventually lead to a golden age of Hollywood. Needless to say, this was uniquely fertile new soil for storytelling. Along the way, virtually every classic tale in the trove of world literature was to become the subject of a film adaptation. 1931’s Frankenstein (directed by James Whale) was thus inevitable. Though it was an instant hit, the film bears little resemblance to the novel, however. Shelley’s incisive proto-psychological character study about hubris and science-gone-awry
certainly would have made for a great film, if perhaps a pretty lengthy film. But would Frankenstein be as ubiquitous a meme as it is today if it had remained faithful to the novel?
It’s hard to say. It’s possible, but I think not. Indeed, when we hear the word Frankenstein today, it’s Boris Karloff’s iconic flat-topped, bolted-neck characterization that invariably spring to our minds. Everybody knows it was a groundbreaking novel, but, when we were kids, it was really this monster movie version that was our introduction to the character, even for those of us who would eventually read the original. This image is permanently burned into our collective mythology, even supplanting the novel’s original vision. Boris Karloff as a grotesque lumbering grunting giant, this is the symbol that Fred Munster, and Young Frankenstein, and Phil Hartman’s “Fire Bad!” parody were all referencing and echoing, rather than Mary Shelley’s sophisticated creature, a creature intelligent enough to teach himself how to read just so that he can imbibe Goethe and Dante. In fact, the creature is the most sophisticated character in the whole book. Therein lies the irony. The proliferation of film as an artistic medium is the reason (at least partially) for the longevity that Frankenstein (the icon) has had, despite the dissimilarity of the film adaptation that burned it into our minds.
As a general rule, the audience of any given movie is less discriminating than its corresponding novel’s readership. This was especially true during that formative period of early cinema. An audience didn’t expect the same kind or level of catharsis from the experience. It need not even be literate, really. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it cannot come close to conveying the nuance of an emotional state or the development of a character the way that prose (as florid as Shelley’s) can. Hollywood wanted a scary monster movie, though, not a morality play or social commentary or articulate epistemological ruminations. “Frankenstein” was thus rewritten (or, rather, the play by Peggy Webling which was the basis of the film adaptation, was) and transformed into a facile fairy tale about madness, about outcasts and mobs. And above all, a monster. Rather than focusing on the function of hubris in human enterprise, or on the audacity of playing God and the consequences this might bring, rather than seriously engaging the many perennial questions that are raised in the novel—e.g. ‘Is reanimation possible? Would a created being have rights? Would it have a soul?’—the emphases are instead “mad scientist” and “monster.” Indeed, the movie’s only source of nuance seems to be its cinematography, which is admittedly state-of-the-art for the time (great use of lighting to evoke a sinister feel). But even the acting is lackluster for the most part. By way of comparison and example, one cannot make a similar criticism of the Moby Dick film adaptation. Hollywood did not turn that classic book into just a story about a nasty whale who kills a bunch of people. It retained at least some of the subtexts and characterizations that make the novel the classic work that it is. Thank goodness.
Why the film bears so little resemblance to the novel is a neglected question. On the surface, we could say it’s a direct result of early screenwriters and producers and directors encountering an unforeseen obstacle in their way, a problem intrinsic to all cinema: How does one treat and condense a classic work of literature, especially one that is rife with archaic linguistic conventions, so that its story can be depicted visually in a way that will seem coherent (and entertaining) to a contemporary audience’s sensibilities in the span of an hour or two? This is easier to do in some cases than in others. It worked in Moby Dick. Not so much in Frankenstein. (To be fair, Moby Dick came more than two decades later, and the techniques in both screenwriting and film making were that much more developed and refined by then.)
Regrettably, the producers of the film chose to dispense altogether with the Prometheus motif. Prometheus is a metaphor for science itself, thoughts about which are a crucial component of the novel. Other than some footage of crackling induction coils and some vague allusions to surgical procedures, which are really mere affectations, science is either completely absent from the movie, or it is relegated to something dangerous, a source of evil from someone who is clearly a madman. It wasn’t a tendentious scheme to make science look bad, surely, but I fear that this kind of relegation has nevertheless had an effect culturally. The fact that the word Frankenstein has been co-opted to mean anything bizarre and unnatural and malevolent (“frankenfood,” for example) illustrates the extent of the influence that this negative correlation has had on society.
The problem, though, is that Prometheus is not a villain. On the contrary, Prometheus is a savior archetype, a hero who sacrifices himself for the sake of all humanity. The intimation that some things should remain forbidden knowledge is neither a part of Shelley’s creative work, nor is it a wise ideological position to take if you ask me. What’s more, I think that this casting of science in this kind of negative light has done, and continues to do, a disservice to our culture inasmuch as it mischaracterizes the function and the nature of science.
I can’t help but muse that perhaps the bad name that science gets as a result of this kind of mischaracterization might simply be the way that the vultures get to eat away at Prometheus’ liver for eternity, like the myth says, as a punishment from the gods. But we are not gods. We are certainly not qualified to judge science as a malevolent force in this way. Why twist the myth so? We are the beneficiaries of Prometheus, not his victims. We seem to be confused.
As someone with a healthy respect for science as the proven way to explore the workings of nature, I’m hopeful that the pendulum will stop swinging in this irrational hyper cynical anti-science direction sooner than later.
